18.1.12
Winter has finally come. I don't care how cold it gets, just as long as it doesn't start raining any time soon. I was so disappointed to come back after New Year's and hear that they had rain in the forecast. Russia was letting me down. Fortunately, there wasn't any rain, and the temperatures have dropped several degrees since then. I think the air has changed accordingly; it's not as damp as it would be it the upper twenties, and so despite its lower temperature, you don't fell it as much. I walked to the company this morning dressed the same as I had been since late Autumn, and I was plenty warm.
I was in Moscow last weekend, and walking as usual. I went to the central school to turn in a sample test I had taken before Christmas but forgotten to turn in. It was a test on teaching young people. The company asked the teachers to voluntarily take the test, the results of which would then help construct the seminar scheduled for the following month. I was so kind as to complete the test, not really trying to hard to get everything correct. Well, after I turned it in to the secratary in the central school last Saturday, it found its way to whomever was running the seminar, who graded it and informed me that I had done really well: 79 points out of 80. I wouldn't say that result shows that I know what I'm doing as a teacher of young students, I'd sooner conclude that I've finally learned how to take a test with questions involving mulitple choices and matching answers in one column with another. If only I had done so well on the SAT's
But as this is the high-point of my educational test-taking career (I've only taken one such test, and I'm thinking that maybe I should quit while I'm ahead), I may as well divulge the secrets to being such a remarkable teacher, who got 79 out of 80 marks on the most accurate of all teaching tests. It's really quite simple. So simple in fact, that I don't know why we actually need fancy tests and seminars, and even four-year degrees on how to be a teacher. There are two things: first, make the material interesting for the students; and second, have many good examples of whatever you're trying to teach. If you can do those two things, you're on your way. Conversely, if ever you fail as a teacher, chances are that you failed in one of those two points. I screwed up yesterday since I hadn't prepared good examples of the difference between to remember doing something and to remember to do something. It turned out to be more difficult than anticipated.
There are other principles too, such as connecting new material to old, in other words, start studying a new concept from a concept that is already known. I had not a little training as a teacher before I moved to Russia, and yet nobody every went over these principles of teaching with me or my colleagues, who were practically as new to the profession as I was. Maybe if I went after a degree in education, I'd learn a lot about education that I haven't yet found in its practice.
I'm not about to apply for a degree in education, though. Instead, I was thinking of signing up for a CELTA course somewhere in Europe next fall. CELTA is a certificate most people get when they want to teach English abroad. I don't have one, and had been thinking that I may do all right without one, as I have; but now that I feel inclined towards continuing the profession, even, dare I say, making a career out of it, I think getting this certificate is a good next step. If the global market for English teachers doesn't crash, then with a CELTA and the experience I have I'll be able to find a job almost anywhere there are people who want to learn English. I find that prospect rather exciting.

I had walked to the central office from the train station last Saturday. Anyone not nuts about walking around Moscow would have taken the metro, but after getting the train, I felt that I didn't fall into that category, and nor did I after leaving the school. Back on the street, I walked from the central school in a direction I hadn't explored before, and soon found myself at the last metro station within the central ring that had till that day eluded my way, Dostoevski station. There were stairs down into the metro, past which the street I had been walking along ran into a large intersection. In front of me and to my left there was a large building with pillars before the entrance, which indicated a theater of some sort. Across the intersection there was an entrance to what looked like a nice park, and to the right there was a square at one end of a long pedestrian way which ran south between two of the intersecting roads towards the trumpet square and, further, the Kremlin. There was a statue of someone in the square, quite possibly Dostoevski, although I didn't check. I thought the theater would be named after him too, but it turns out that it was a drama theater featuring military plays. It occured to me then that Dostoevski wasn't much of a playwright, and although there certainly are stage performances of "Crime and Punishment," and other works of his, I guess they don't amount to enough to justify dedicating an entire theater to him.
I took the street to the left, walked along it between the theater and the park, and immediately came upon another large building, which was obviously not a theater (there weren't any pillars), but with life-sized model tanks and artillery stationed outside, was quite clearly a museum, one which, like the theater next to it, specialized in military events. I went inside to look at the prices. It was about three dollars emission. That means it can't be very big or famous. I would have entered if the sun hadn't come out. The weather wasn't bad, and I had my walking legs on that day.
Indeed I ended up walking a lot on that day. I continued along the street, made a connection at an intersection with the middle ring highway, went a little out of my way to visit an Ashan for a pit stop, then back tracked a little to reach the Riga train station, as I had several weeks before, but this time instead of going back to Olympiski street, went further in the same direction in search of yet another Ashan branch, one that I hadn't visited before. I found myself walking up a rather long bridge. There was a lot of traffic, but besides that the view was rather nice. At the summit of the bridge I could see to the north a very tall tower which I can't imagine to be for anything but radio or television.
That tower had been accompanying me that entire day. If I'm not mistaken, it's this tower that was featured at the end of Dmitri Gluxhovski's novel Metro 2033, a fantasy novel about life in the Moscovian metro after global nuclear war has rendered mankind's existence on the earth's surface impossible. I think it's closest to a metro station I don't know well, VDNX. I'll have to explore it some more.
I refocused myself on the task at hand, and left the tower behind as I turned southeast, towards the large buildings around Komsomolski Square, one of them the Hilton Hotel, another one was the tower of one of the three train stations located there, and a little further stood another one of Stalin's castles. As I was walking down the other side of the bridge, shortly past the end of it, between some tall buildings I intermittently caught glimpses of an Ashan billboard. The store itself couldn't have been far away.
It wasn't. I entered, found a cheap collection of audiobooks featuring literary material, poetry and shorter works of various famous authors who are studied in Russian schools, and got out of there.
I quickly reached Komsomolski square, and found a dollar store that I had on my map. I don't know if I've written about dollar stores yet. Well, they have them here, only they call them 'Fixed Price,' where everything costs thiry six rubles, or a little over a dollar. I frequent these shops in search of two goods: very dark chocolate, 90% cocoa, which I haven't been able to find anywhere else, and audiobooks. Some of the audiobooks I've found on sale there are ones that I bought already long ago, at a price of much more than thirty six rubles! But I've taken advantage of the low price so much already that more often than not my findings are the other way around: I find audiobooks on sale at some bookstores which I have already bought at Fixed Price, fortunately.
This particular dollar store didn't have any audio or chocolate to offer, so I got on my way, which quickly lead me to the metro and back home.

11.1.12
I admit that it was hard to leave home on the evening of the fourth. My oldest brother was going to stay there for a few more days, while I was embarking on the long trip back to my work life. Even before my arrival in California I had thought about how the end of my vacation would feel, to be on the way to the shuttle terminal where I would get a ride to the airport in San Francisco, and I had hoped that I would be filled with much more anticipation for my return to Russia than I actually felt.
The weather in California couldn't have been much better. How many places in the world have a blue sky like California's, and how many let its residents see it as often as in California? Maybe I had hoped for more rain and temperatures closer to freezing, so that coming back to a place with, theoretically, more snowfall would be much more welcome.
And yet, even if something had happened, if my flight had been cancelled due to bad weather in New York or something like that, and I had been forced to spend another week at home, I may have regretted that as well. While staying at home, it doesn't take long before I begin to feel like a retired person with not enough to do. Even if I were as prone to finding random chores around the property as my Dad and older brother are, it wouldn't take long before boredom sets in and I begin to long for travel in far off lands.
These feelings must be a part of a phase I'm going through, as I live the final months of my glorious twenties. California just doesn't have enough problems. Life there is too easy. How easy it would be to find a job, teaching math say, even at a private school, settle down, and live out the rest of my life in relative ease. I would go crazy! I need a harsher climate, I need a foreign language and culture, I need to not understand and not be understood, and I need a difficult job (teaching math would be much easier) in order to spare myself from the banality that I might fall into if I decided to return to California for good. In short, I need a balance of challenges; and any life I could possibly imagine for myself, in California or elsewhere in the states, be it running into the brick walls of advanced mathematics or teaching teenageers the basics of something I know well, doesn't have the right balance.
Or maybe it's that I feel I know the U.S. too well to want to stay there for a long time. That's not to say life is particularly bad in the states, on the contrary, depending on what one finds good, in some regards American politicians may be right to say that the American way of life is superior to others. But life in the states can't help but bore me, because I perceive how big the world is and how much there is to experience outside of my home country. I know the U.S. I've lived in the liberal west, I've lived in the bible belt. I've worked with university professors as well as high-school drop-outs at a local ballon company. I've worked on really hard math problems and picked up dog poop at a kennel near my home. One might be right to say that there's still a lot I haven't experienced in the U.S., but for all that I haven't seen there, there's so much more in other places of the world that, try as I might to experience them, will go by unnoticed. But it doesn't hurt to try, because it's those experiences that fuel me. My life would be so much more meaningless without them.
Teaching English has been a means to that end. That's not to say that teaching itself is void of meaning. Depending on what day you ask me, my job can be the bane of my existence, or its salvation. I wish that I could be happy with it every day, but I've come to believe that this is impossible. Constant positive or negative feeling does not exist, for after a long period of one extreme or the other, you forget about where you stand - if you haven't experienced anything negative for awhile, then even the smallest bad day may seem a tragedy, and vise versa. In short, feelings are relative, like everything else. So what kind of day is today? O.K. so far, but certainly not a very good day; otherwise I wouldn't be thinking about this!

After returning last Friday, I had a few days off before work began yesterday. I did what I usually do on my days off, which is get to Moscow, either by train or Marshrutka (public transport by van), and walk to my heart's content. I went to the cinema twice and saw some old movies at the theater in the far wing of the China-town castle. One of them was Austrian, called "A Man and twelve Women." It must have been filmed in the fifties, and was cute in a fifties way. The other was a Russian dub of the French film "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."
There are still plenty of things to see in the city, including several museums of history and literature. Apparently, several Russian and Soviet writers lived in Moscow, and some of their homes have been turned into museums. I was thinking of going to the Bulgakov museum. Bulgakov wrote what is considered by many to be the most popular novel among Russians, while it's almost unheard of back home, "The Master and Margarita." He also wrote a novel called something like "The White Guard," which, ironically, Stalin allegedly really enjoyed. I don't know much about the novel or the history behind it, but I think the 'whites' where the opponents of the bolshevik 'reds,' who ended up winning the revolution and eventually placing Stalin in power. Anyway, I've passed this man's, Bulgakov's, previous living quarters, now the Bulgakov museum, and was thinking of stopping by. There's also a museum dedicated to Gogol, and probably more than one to Pushkin, as well as museums on several other authors. And those are only the museums of literature! My Moscow marathon is not even halfway done, and already I wonder if I'll be able to experience everything Moscow has to offer. I haven't even been to a theater yet!